Media Management Today - Part 1
State of Media Management Today - PAM, MAM, DAM+
This is part 1 of a 2 part blog on the state of Media Management. To do it justice requires a bit of looking backwards as well as setting the stage around our needs for media management to support media supply chain needs today.
Part 1 looks at how Media Management has be defined, categorized and evolved to where we are today.
Part 2 will look at the significant expansion of what is Media Management in recent years - specifically considering how Media Management:
is a tool supporting one or more stages in the media supply chain,
is an underlying capability across the media supply chain,
is a capability embedded as a service into different product offerings or solutions
Media Management Part 1:
The question of what is Media Management and what capabilities should it support has been an evolving topic for over the past 20 years. This year at NAB 2023 didn’t disappoint. With the cloud platform and service providers delivering capabilities for people with little or limited software development experience to develop new tools and services we have a broadly expanding media management marketplace.
Historically we would define Media Management by both the media supply chain stage it supports and/or the breadth of the services it provides. Below we define different types of media management solutions that have historically been available:
Production Asset Management (PAM) has historically been media management systems focused on management of in-production media and their projects (sometimes) - both raw and source media as well as finished outputs. Avid Interplay and Mia, which became Oyalla, are examples of this type of system.
Media Asset Management (MAM) or Digital Asset Management (DAM) has had a broad connotation.
Full service MAM, historically operationally in control with integrated workflow, content processing, media asset management with technical metadata support as well as more complex media container support (MXF, IMF, etc) and some level of support for descriptive metadata about the Title, Promo, etc. Examples include Dalet, Tedial, Artesia/Opentext, Cinebase, BlueOrder, Bulldog, etc.
Lighter weight MAMs, often which were focused on short form media assets, such as those in marketing, and managed media assets as lighter weight indexes into content. This typically meant no capabilities such as partial restore or complex media processing
MAM Platform as a Service providers. Vidispine was one of the earliest. It offered a ‘white labeled MAM’, with media management services and tools that could be integrated via API into your own solutions and infrastructure to deliver needed media management capabilities. They also offered a light-weight MAM as a service, VidiNet, to help get organizations started. Vidispine was acquired by Arvato in 2017, and is still actively used and licensed today. A few others have entered the market but have not had as much success.
Mini-MAM was a term Perspective Media Group coined in early 2000’s when companies like Front Porch Digital, MassTech, SGL, and even Vidispine came to the market. Their strength was their rich content indexing and retrieval capabilities such as partial restore. They provided limited, typically flat, descriptive/business metadata management. They also supported more limited workflow orchestration vs. the broader full-service MAMs.
As the shift to the cloud for media storage was becoming more viable and cost effective, the market for these mini-MAM products was significantly reduced. Oracle acquired Front Porch Digital and then end-of-lifed the product. Masstech and SGL merged to create Masstech Innovations (2017). Today, the IP of all three of these companies has been acquired by Telestream.
Content Management, also a broadly overused term, has been used to define
Light weight indexing into file systems, or lower level rewriting of the file-system indexing to deliver optimized storage and access for large media files. These often were built on early on-premise object storage with companies such as EMC, Isilon and Qumulo. Today, this has significantly expanded with the likes of LucidLink connected with BackBlaze, Wasiba, and many other object storage companies beyond traditional PaaS providers such as AWS, Google, Azure, IBM.
Content under management for Web publishing, as well as management or reference to files and storage
Has Media Management since the Cloud and AI/ML became a Commodity?
Today, the landscape for Media Management has changed dramatically. Key reasons why include:
The Cloud as a Commodity: The requirement for OpEx investment in storage and availability of content processing as a service has significantly reduced the barrier to entry.
Elastic search, tags, NoSQL databases, and AI/ML
Use of AI/ML for automated metadata harvesting of all types of media to drive ability to tag, index, search and find media assets without requiring the development of a linked or relational database model to manage information
Large Language Models (LLM) AI engines such as ChatGPT are changing Search and services offered in Media Management.
Integration of services through APIs.
You don’t have to be a C++, Java or Java Script programmer….
In Media Management Part 2 we will explore the landscape of Media Management today, including new cloud-native entrants and expanded services integrated into point solutions, tools and underlying enterprise media management capabilities.